Tuesday, February 19, 2013

“We Will Be Greeted As Liberators,” Why The Bush Administration Saw Iraq As A War Of Liberation

Before 2003, many members of the Bush White House held a
rosy image of what the Iraq war would be like. Kenneth Adelman of the Defense
Policy Board for example wrote an op ed for the Washington Post entitled
“Cakewalk in Iraq.” Vice President Dick Cheney told NBC’s Meet The Press
that Iraqis would see the Americans as liberators. These scenarios were
based upon several factors including advice officials received from Middle East
scholars and Iraqi exiles. Most importantly, President Bush and others were
driven by their conviction that what they were doing was right, and therefore
would have a positive affect in the end. The reality of what the invasion
wrought in Iraq would quickly change Washington’s view of things.

Professors Bernard Lewis and Fouad Ajami were key in
convincing Vice President Cheney that Iraq and the Middle East were ripe for
democratization and a war of liberation (Association
for the Study of the Middle East and Africa)

The Bush administration was largely bereft of any high officials
that knew about Iraq. There were several who were involved in the 1991 Gulf War
such as Vice President Dick Cheney, Secretary of State Colin Powell, and Deputy
Secretary of Defense Paul Wolfowitz, but actual knowledge of Iraq’s internal
politics was lacking. Following the attacks on 9/11 Vice President Cheney
attempted to fill in some of these gaps by asking experts to brief him about
the Middle East and Islam such as Princeton Professor Bernard Lewis and Fouad Ajami then of Johns Hopkins. Lewis and Ajami held the view that the Middle East was a backward region, because of its dictatorships, corruption,
extremists, and lack of cultural and economic development. They held Saddam
Hussein as a prime example of the problems facing the Arab world. The two
advocated the use of American military force to overthrow Saddam, and begin the
process of modernization and democratization of the entire area. This would be
greeted by locals they argued, because Arabs knew they had difficulties, but
could not solve them themselves. In August 2002, the Vice President went public
with some of these ideas in a speech at the annual convention of the Veterans of Foreign Wars. “Regime change in Iraq would bring about a number of benefits
to the region. When the gravest threats are eliminated, the freedom-loving
peoples of the region will have a chance to promote the values that can bring
lasting peace. As for the reaction of the Arab “street,” the Middle East expert
Professor Fouad Ajami predicts that after liberation, the streets in Basra and
Baghdad are ‘sure to erupt in joy in the same way the throngs in Kabul greeted
the Americans,’” said Cheney. This dovetailed with beliefs held by neoconservatives that the domestic policies of countries determined their foreign
agendas. Countries that were run by autocrats who did not care about their
own populations would not care about other countries, and were therefore more
likely to cause problems in the international system such as wars. They also
believed in the forceful promotion of democracy and human rights around the
world using the American military. The ideas of thinkers like Lewis, Ajami, and
the neoconservatives gave some ideological support to the President’s agenda of
overthrowing Saddam Hussein. They gave moral weight to the administration’s
argument that the invasion of Iraq would help not only the Iraqi people, but
the region and the world in general.

Iraqi exiles also assured the president that Iraq would
welcome the overthrow of Saddam. On January 10, 2003, author and member of the
Iraqi National Congress Kanan Makiya, head of the Iraq Foundation Rend Rahim,
and head of the Iraqi National Movement Hatem Muklis met with President Bush,
Vice President Cheney, National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice, and White
House representative to the Iraqi opposition Zalmay Khalilzad in Washington.
Makiya said that the invasion of Iraq would change America’s image in the Arab
world from being a supporter of dictators to one of liberators, and that Iraqis
were modern professionals who were waiting for the yoke of oppression to be
thrown off them. He told the gathering that, “People will greet the [U.S.]
troops with sweets and flowers.” Muklis on the other hand believed that if the
Americans did not win over the public immediately after the overthrow of the
regime they would turn on them, a warning that went unheeded. Cheney would
later mention this meeting an interview with Tim Russert on NBC’s Meet The
Press in March, just before the invasion. Russert asked the Vice President what
would happen if the public did not welcome the Americans, and Iraq turned into
a long and bloody occupation. Cheney responded, “I don’t think it’s likely to
unfold that way, Tim, because I really do believe that we will be greeted as
liberators. I’ve talked with a lot of Iraqis in the last several months myself,
had them to the White House. … The read we get on the people of Iraq is there
is no question but what they want is to get rid of Saddam Hussein and they will
welcome as liberators the United States when we come to do that.” The meeting
with Makiya, Rahim, and Muklis reassured the president and other administration
officials that their course of action was a righteous one. For Cheney, their
views only supported what he had already been hearing from Lewis and Ajami.
Iraq was prime for regime change, something that the Iraqis themselves had been
waiting for a long time.

Other members of the administration shared these ideas. In
early 2003 for example, the CIA believed that the Shiites of southern Iraq would greet the Coalition forces after years of harsh treatment by Saddam. Operatives at the Agency even suggested that American flags should be sneaked
into Iraq so that they could be waved as U.S. troops entered the country. That
would be filmed and used as part of a propaganda campaign in the Arab world.
The plan never got off the ground. Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz told Congress in February 2003 that post-war Iraq would be easier than the invasion,
because Iraqis would embrace America. “I am reasonably certain that [Iraqis]
will greet us as liberators, and that will help us to keep [post-war]
requirements down,” he remarked. “We can say with reasonable confidence
that the notion of hundreds of thousands of American troops [being necessary
for post-invasion Iraq] is way off the mark,” the Deputy Defense Secretary
continued. His comments came in response to Chief of Staff of the Army General
Eric Shinseki who warned Congress that America’s experience in the former
Yugoslavia pointed to a large occupation force being necessary to maintain
order after initial military operations were over. Wolfowitz was a
neoconservative who was one of the strongest advocates of spreading democracy
throughout the Middle East by invading Iraq. CIA Director George Tenet threw
his support behind the President’s Iraq policy, and set up several groups
within the Agency to deal with it. This showed that both true believers in the
war, and some members of the long-term bureaucracy saw post-war Iraq as being
the easy part of the war, because the Coalition would be embraced by the public
opening the way for a quick conflict and an early exit.

Polling of Iraqis after the 2003 invasion showed that
many did welcome the U.S, but quickly turned against it. In April 2003, nearly 50% of Iraqis saw the Americans as liberators. Half a year later in
October, that had dramatically changed as only one in six held that view. In
April 2004, a USA Today/CNN/Gallup survey found that 71% of Iraqis saw the U.S.
as occupiers, 46% said that they had done more harm than good in Iraq, while
only 19% said the U.S. were liberators. In June, only 2% of the public had
a favorable opinion of the Coalition. As the polls showed, many people were
happy that Saddam was overthrown. The post-war chaos that followed in the wake
of the Coalition forces quickly spoiled that mood. It seemed as if Muklis was
prophetic when he warned the White House that Iraqis would quickly turn on the
Americans if they didn’t see immediate benefits from the invasion.

President Bush believed in the liberation of Iraq and the
spreading of democracy. Several members of his administration such as Vice
President Cheney and Deputy Secretary of Defense Wolfowitz shared those views.
Middle Eastern experts and Iraqi exiles assured the White House that Iraq was
ready for freedom, and could transform the region. Those predictions proved
partially true when Coalition forces were initially welcomed in Iraq. The
problem was the United States had no plans for what to do after the fall of
Saddam, and things quickly turned sour. With no authority running the country
anymore, Iraqis took matters into their own hands, and started looting and
murdering as the Iraqi bureaucracy and police disappeared. Chaos was what the
Americans ended up bringing to Iraq, which cost them any good will that might
have initially been generated. This change in mood took a while to work its way
up from the U.S. soldiers on the ground to Washington, but the White House did
eventually give up its vision of Iraq as a quick war of liberation, and thereafter saw it as a
long-term occupation that would hopefully end in a democracy in time.

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Musings On Iraq was started in 2008 to explain the politics, economics, security, culture and history of Iraq via original articles and interviews. If you wish to contact me personally my email is: motown67@aol.com